Photographing People Quotes

#1. I'm very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I've barely heard of them.

Diane Arbus

#2. Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.

Edward Weston

#3. My way in for photographing people is really their work. I'm always interested in what people make, and then I photograph the person. Sometimes the person is a disappointment. But that's the risk. It informs me a lot about the character of a person if I know their work first.

Anton Corbijn

#4. I'm more interested in photographing people who have done something, like writers or directors - even billionaires - as long as I can study them before I photograph them.

Francesco Carrozzini

#5. Sometimes photographing people is like pulling teeth, trying to get some sort of personality.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

#6. I like taking photographs, because I like life. And I like photographing people best of all, because most of all I love humanity.

Horst P. Horst

#7. The interviews have gotten much longer with 'Humans of New York.' When I was first starting, I was just photographing people. And then I went to just kind of including a quote or two. Now when I'm approaching somebody on the street, I'm spending about 30 to 45 minutes with them often.

Brandon Stanton

#8. There's always been something illicit about the way I work. I'm photographing people I don't know, when nobody else is home - there's a necessary degree of secrecy.

Katy Grannan

#9. My strength is looking for composition and light, and I think those things come in the quieter times of war or photographing people affected on the margins of war - civilians, refugees; that is where I really excel.

Lynsey Addario

#10. Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women.

Lynsey Addario

#11. I'm not interested into victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.

Richard Misrach

#12. I started photographing people on the street during World War II. I used a little box Brownie. Nothing too expensive.

Bill Cunningham

#13. I have been photographing people dancing for 20 or 30 years now, and I think I will eventually do a book of dancing photos.

Martin Parr

#14. I've never been comfortable photographing people I know, myself included. I guess I prefer the mystery of strangers.

Alec Soth

#15. I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.

Sebastiao Salgado

#16. I told myself, 'When I grow up, I want to make pictures that can inspire and nourish people.' Immediately, when I was 10, I started photographing nature. I built a darkroom. My first really good darkroom, not just down in the cellar, was when I was 14.

Bill Atkinson

#17. I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Helmut Newton

#18. I photograph [people] as if photographing flowers.

Mona Kuhn

#19. To photograph people is to obligate them in some way to face things they weren't expecting to.

Susana Fortes

#20. Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

William Eggleston

#21. I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.

Mary Ellen Mark

#22. I've always been fascinated by twins. In my forty years of photographing, whenever there was an opportunity, I would take a picture of twins. I found the notion that two people could appear to look exactly alike very compelling.

Mary Ellen Mark

#23. I've seen my own blood and broken a few bones. I've been hit, which isn't an entirely bad thing, as at least you have a glimpse of the suffering endured by the people you are photographing. And in a sense, crumbling empires and war have been with me all my life.

Don McCullin

#24. The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words.

Elliott Erwitt

#25. People aren't photographing for history any more. It's for immediate gratification. If you're photographing to share an image, you're not photographing to keep it.

Larry Towell

#26. What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing ... if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.

Eve Arnold

#27. I think I misunderstood Instagram and just thought it was people photographing their friends, and discovered there were a number of people, a number of artists, who were taking it very seriously and doing very imaginative work with Instagram as the medium.

Stephen Shore

#28. I am a storyteller. I've never been interested in just taking the single image and moving on. I always like to stay with the people I'm photographing for long periods of time.

Larry Clark

#29. Don't expect things to happen fast. Be empathetic with the people you are photographing. Don't be concerned about money.

Lynsey Addario

#30. Photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places. (Summary of his photographic career)

Slim Aarons

#31. I spend my days photographing beautiful things for other people. ... Two of my favorite things: breakfast + morning light.

Jennifer Causey

#32. People tracking your life and photographing you anywhere you go, that can make you crazy.

Tom Selleck

#33. I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia, and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question.

Mary Ellen Mark

#34. For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge. So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it - something that was very aggressive and dangerous - and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence.

Trevor Paglen

#35. I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.

James Nachtwey

#36. Today, it's almost the outlier if people are not photographing what they ate and then sharing that in real time.

Danny Meyer

#37. Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.

Duane Michals

#38. People think photography is about photographing. To me, it's about relationships.

Lynsey Addario

#39. I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people.

Richard Avedon